Sam Harris's "The Moral Landscape"

[spoonless]

via crasch,

In this highly anticipated new book, the bestselling author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation calls for an end to religion’s monopoly on morality and human values.

"In this explosive new book, Sam Harris tears down the wall between scientific facts and human values, arguing that most people are simply mistaken about the relationship between morality and the rest of human knowledge. Harris urges us to think about morality in terms of human and animal well-being, viewing the experiences of conscious creatures as peaks and valleys on a “moral landscape.” Because there are definite facts to be known about where we fall on this landscape, Harris foresees a time when science will no longer limit itself to merely describing what people do in the name of “morality”; in principle, science should be able to tell us what we ought to do to live the best lives possible." - The Free Press

"I was one of those who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. The Moral Landscape has changed all that for me." - Richard Dawkins

Very interesting! This caught my eye because of my recent debate with easwaran over whether science might ever be able to bridge the "is-ought" gap and give moral prescriptions:

http://spoonless.livejournal.com/180836.html?thread=1532772#t1532772

As I argue in the thread with easwaran, I do not think science will ever be able to say anything about fundamental values, and I do not believe there are objectively right or wrong answers to questions like "how many kittens lives is one human life worth?" I've never believed that moral "truths" are the same kinds of truths that we talk about when we talk about facts about the world--rather, I think they are facts about our personal desires and whims, which are inherently subjective. But I have great respect for Richard Dawkins, and if he says this book (which just came out a month ago) has completely changed his mind on such an important issue, then I will surely give it a chance--perhaps it can change my mind too. Somehow I doubt it, but nevertheless I look forward to reading it! While I've never agreed with the idea of objective morality, I have always found the possibility positively tantalizing and have often thought "I'd like nothing more than for that to be true--I wish it was, but I know it couldn't possibly be."

Comments

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I've only heard awful things about Harris' stuff. It sounds like he takes relatively simplistic thought about how values relate to mental states, and then supplements it with simplistic thought about how mental states relate to fMRI scans, and then tries to claim that the resulting theory is more "objective" because it uses fancy science. But then again, I haven't actually read his stuff, this is just what I've gathered from some philosopher friends who have read some of it, and seeing on his wikipedia entry that he did some philosophy early in his career, then studied some Buddhism, and then recently got a PhD in some of the brain scanning stuff.

[vaelynphi.livejournal.com]

I, too, am unimpressed by Harris; should *Dennett* write something on this subject, then I'll get excited. (I'll probably read his book, but I'm not holding my breath that it's going to be even remotely 'groundbreaking'.)

[geheimnisnacht.livejournal.com]

Interesting, I didn't you take the stance "I do not think science will ever be able to say anything about fundamental values". My stance has recently been:

-Scientific inquiry is the only revealer of truth
-Philosphy (and similar lines) are only "human approximations" to these truths
-Some problems/questions are currently untenable to science, and some of these may remain forever untenable due to complexity issues.
-Where unable, science should be replaced with philosophical/etc arguments.

An example of a philosophical approximation would be "Everyone has a right to their life". This works most of the time, but perhaps there are some extreme cases where it does not. Building from that as an axiom, you can go further and try to address more problems

Your example of the kitten vs human lives is perhaps one of those we are unable to process currently, so we should look to philosophy instead. The above axiom would be relevant here, but then you could claim other axioms such as "all life is sacred". In the end, it seems like it would essentially be a popularity contest between axioms.

[essius.livejournal.com]

The reason that modern science will never be able to say anything about fundamental values is not because science gets us truth (which it sometimes does) and ethics is reducible to subjective preferences or societal consensus (which it clearly is not, though I notice you disagree). Rather, the modern sciences are empirical while ethics is part of philosophical or metascientific knowledge. It is from the latter and not the former that we derive transcendental concepts such as being, unity, truth and goodness, and that is true both of ontological goodness generally and moral goodness (the good of the human being qua rational agent) specifically. A failure to properly distinguish science from metascience is one of many significant defects of the New Atheism, and we see this defect in the thinking of Harris, Dawkins and even Dan Dennett (see his Darwin's Dangerous Idea; cf. criticisms in Joyce's Evolution of Morality; Rosenberg and Sommers "Darwin's nihilistic idea: Evolution and the meaninglessness of life," Biology and Philosophy 18: 653-68, et alii). Not all are making this error (cf. Carroll and Meyers (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/05/sam_harris_v_sean_carroll.php?)), but quite many of them indeed are.

Ultimately, Harris is on track when it comes to this notion of well-being. But unfortunately what counts as well-being is not a scientific notion. What is it to flourish in terms of survival of individuals, species, or even culture(s) (whether or not the latter is understood in terms of "memes")? That's a question science can answer. But what is it to flourish as a human being? Is flourishing really reducible to survival, or is it something else? These are metascientific questions, and as such they are not ones that science can answer. Science does not give us an ontological understanding of substance, nor can it divide substances into animate and inanimate or, further, animate substances into rational and irrational. And without this metaphysics of the human person, there is no way to determine what counts as true well-being, or achievement of real eudaimonia or human flourishing. So Harris is on the right track but he diverges too far from Aristotle and fails to keep in mind the differentiation of the sciences into the mathematical, the physical, and the metaphysical. Perhaps he fears that conceding too much to metaphysics will require confronting the First Mover arguments, which no atheist old or new has ever succeeded in defeating.

[datavortex.livejournal.com]

Just finished this book. It's a very strong argument and it definitely affected my own views. I would now accept that neuroscience can contribute to defining what is provably a moral good.

Highly recommend the text.

[geheimnisnacht.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there are a few handfuls of nuanced definitions of "desire". What I am trying to describe here, as desire, is just "wanting to do something" e.g. feeling hungry means you desire to eat, thirst is the desire to drink, lust is the desire for sex. Is there any emotion associated with hunger? Not in my definition, but emotion is probably one of the loosest words out there.

Anyway, so I'm saying that because of empathy, one might desire to help another person in a tough situation. Because of guilt one desires to admit wrongdoing. Here your desires are, more or less, the set of actions you'd like to take at a given time.

I think there are values involved in this if you look at it the right way. Indeed, the issue of gay marriage is often considered a "values" issue in politics.

I'm really baffled how you keep missing the point. Am I that bad at explaining things? I am only talking about the innate desire to have sex with a certain person. Some desire men, some desire women. There is no value associated with the desire itself. You don't say "I value heterosexuality", you say "I am a heterosexual" or equivalently "I desire heterosexual sex". Yes, how that desire fits into the grand scheme has become a value debate because of the arbitrary axiom "Practicing homosexuality is immoral" followed by some of the religious. Technically, I suppose, anything could be arbitrarily made a value, but practically it has at least been restricted to actions for the most part. Religions, as far as I know, recognize that you can have "urges" and it is only immoral if you act on it, instead of suppress it.